Being a full-time everything is tough

A peril of being an independent writer is that you have to do it all yourself.  Everything from writing (of course), to correspondence, to finding events, to figuring out marketing, to making book covers, and so much more.  This all takes a substantial amount of time.  But if we pay, then we need to come up with the money, which means working, which cuts into the time to write or revise or do anything else.  Add in parenting for those of us who are parents, time with friends, other activities…

In addition to being a writer, I am also a mother of a 7-year-old who is partly homeschooled and who takes ballet multiple times a week in a professional school in the next state over, and I take ballet, and I’m on the board of a regency society, a Girl Scout leader, a volunteer for many things, and we haven’t even touched on me being a wife or having friends.  Oh!  I also have a small business, and that means doing everything from website work to Facebook page stuff and Easy, fielding commission requests, doing those commissions, shipping, and on and on.  I don’t sleep much.

Writing a blog, after all the other typing I do, just makes my hands tired.  I’m thinking about attempting a vlog.  There’s so much I want to write about that I get overwhelmed.  I’ve had so many questions from here and there and everywhere, some which I think are very important to address (such as would I consider writing a book through the POV of a non-white or LGBT person?) and writing tips I’ve learned along the way.  I think this is what I will do.  Since I need some breaks here and there anyway, why not do some work that won’t feel like actual work?  I’m sure that any vloggers reading this are laughing at me.

I think I’ll do this on Wednesday mornings since my daughter has campus classes those mornings.  So, I suppose, watch out next Thursday. 🙂

Systemic Sexism

I don’t even want to think about how long it’s been since I’ve last written.  I will address this tomorrow in a post I already have written.  I wrote this post on Facebook, and it’s relevant here, and so I’m sharing it:

Best Seth Meyer segment I’ve seen to date. Sad, sad reality is that this shit happens so often that we women more or less accept it as a sort of tax on being women. I was first molested at 5, an incident when I was 11 that I still can’t talk about, a classmate tried to force himself on me when I was 17, spent five years in a relationship that turned abusive not even one year in (physical, sexual, and mental), I can’t even begin to put a number on how many assholes have groped me on BART trains in the Bay Area or forced themselves on me at clubs. The reason only the molester when I was 5 was reported is because who would have believed me the other times, and, if someone did, it’s not like the police would do anything more than ask me why I stayed with an abuser, or how can I prove anything.

That at least 25 women have been assaulted and raped by Harvey, 51 women by Cosby, I don’t even know if we can count how many women Trump have pushed himself onto, at least 7 for O’Reilly, “just” 3 for Clinton (that I could find in a 5-second Google search)…83 women whose names are known…and yet those cretins suffered no consequences for years because the word of women isn’t taken at face value. Those women stayed around and stayed quiet because they had everything to lose. The men held all the power, and they had none. So the men saw, and still see, women as their property.

By the way, when you hear the stat that 1 in 3 women have been sexually assaulted, and think to yourself, “But 1 in 3 men aren’t rapists and wouldn’t assault,” just remember that those five men are responsible for at least 83 women. If each man was responsible for just one, which is what would be needed for 1 in 3, then we’d need a group of 249 men so that 1 in 3 are bad. But if you take those 249, and have those five assholes be in that group, well, you’re got 244 good guys who would never assault or rape a woman. There are far, far, FAR more guys out there who would never rape, but those who do are extremely dangerous and rarely stop at just one. They have no reason to. We women are their property because they have the power. This is male privilege. Thank goodness most men will not take advantage of it, but that they could, and could get away with it, just scratches the surface of this major problem.